Film Studies For Free welcomes with wide open e-arms the fabulous new issue of JUMP CUT. Just look at all that high quality content, the links to which stretch out below, almost as far as the mouse can scroll.

JUMP CUT truly goes from strength to strength with its focus on contemporary and international cinema, media, aesthetics, reception and politics. FSFF hasn't digested the entire issue yet, but so far particularly likes the dossier on Third Cinema filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés, Ian Murphy's article on two films by Claire Denis, and Diane Waldman's very thoughtful review of Vicki Callahan's important edited collection, Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History together with Suzanne Leonard's great study of Fatal Attraction.

Its brilliant and hardworking editors -- John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage -- deserve our admiration and sincere thanks for all the excellent, politically and ethically engaged research they help to bring into the public domain in our disciplines. Their stance and efforts are as crucial now as they have ever been.

Finally, in the week that brought the very sad news of the death of Octavio Getino, best known for co-founding, along with Fernando Solanas, the Grupo Cine Liberación as well as for elaborating with Solanas and others the notion of Third Cinema, and in memory of this great film theorist and practitioner, interested readers might like to be reminded of FSFF's earlier related entries (see below), which contain links to numerous, past JUMP CUT offerings, and also check out Michael Chanan's tribute to Getino and historian Eric Hobsbawm here.

Migrant workers, women, and China’s modernization on screen by Jenny Kwok Wah Lau. Even though China's migrant workers constitute the biggest human migration in the world at this time the life circumstances of these workers receive little attention in Chinese cinema. This article explores how visual media, including installation arts, documentary films, and narrative films expose the often neglected issues of women migrants.

Defining the popular auteur, or what it means to be human within the machine by Caroline Guo. Review of Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film by Stephen Teo. Stephen Teo tackles Johnnie To’s multifaceted role in the Hong Kong film industry: this review picks up where his monograph leaves off to grapple with the filmmaker’s ongoing evolution and rethink the notion of the “popular auteur.”

Digital pleasure palaces: Bollywood seduces the global Indian at the multiplex by Manjunath Pendakur. Malls, multiplexes and digital cinemas are symbols of the fast-modernizing, neoliberal India of the 21st century and, in these turbulent conditions, Bollywood is expanding its audiences at home and abroad while the political-economic-technological changes have resulted in new conflicts and a reshaping of the film industry's internal structure and operation.

The all-encompassing sequence shot by Jorge Sanjinés, translated by Cecilia Cornejo and Dennis Hanlon. Jorge Sanjinés' 1989 essay explains the development of the "Andean sequence shot" and why it is consonant with indigenous Andean concepts of community and time. A key piece of Third Cinema theory never before translated into English.

The “new” and the “old” in Bolivian cinema by Verónica Córdova S., translated by Amy L. Tibbitts. Verónica Córdova S. remarks on the motivations of the New Latin American Cinema movement of the 60s as contrasted with current trends and concerns of present-day Bolivian filmmakers. Using the films of Jorge Sanjinés as a model, Córdova explains how new technological advances in filmmaking are influencing Bolivian film production, while, hopefully, remaining in dialogue with the past generation of filmmakers.

A cinema of questions: a response to Verónica Córdova by Martín Boulocq, translated by Amy L. Tibbitts. Martín Boulocq responds to Verónica Córdova's comments regarding the motivation of past and present Bolivian filmmakers, offering an entirely unique perspective on what motivates filmmakers to make films.

Insurgentes: the slight return of Jorge Sanjinés by Keith John Richards. Jorge Sanjinés’ most recent film, Insurgentes, has aroused differences of opinion within Bolivia; this review examines the film in the context of recent developments in the country.

Postmodern geekdom as simulated ethnicity by Kom Kunyosying and Carter Soles. As geekdom moves from the cultural fringes into the mainstream, contemporary media frame white male geeks sympathetically by allowing them to simulate racially marked victimhood in order to justify their existence as protagonists in a world where an unmarked straight white male hero is increasingly passé.

Babel’s national frames in global Hollywood by Leisa Rothlisberger. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel may be a melodrama about the human implications of globalization, but it also reveals the consequences of neoliberal policy for individuals as well as the global film industry.

2. The Mideast

Looking back on Iraq: winning American hearts and minds by Patricia Ventura. Using key documentaries and reality TV shows, this essay explores how popular support for neoliberal U.S. war involves powerful forces mobilizing a necropolitics that the essay analyzes in its many facets.

The unquiet memory of the Hollywood Blacklist by Clay Steinman. Review of Alan Casty’s Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal and Joseph Litvak’s The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture . Sixty-five years after it began, the Hollywood blacklist continues to offer new lessons for left cultural practices, including the right’s ongoing response to them.

Feminist film history by Diane Waldman. Review of Vicki Callahan (ed), Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History and Suzanne Leonard's Fatal Attraction

The Hurt Locker litigation: an adult’s story by Robert Alpert . Jeffrey Sarver, the alleged doppelganger to Kathryn Bigelow’s fictional character, William James, is crushed in real life, where law, on the one hand, and ethics and morality, on the other, frequently do not coincide.

RuPaul’s Drag Race as meta-reality television by Nicholas de Villiers. RuPaul’s Drag Race—considered as a “meta-text” that incorporates and parodies Paris Is Burning, America’s Next Top Model, and Project Runway—demonstrates how drag-as-citation destabilizes notions of originality, and how queer culture is passed on in the age of new media.

Truth in the mix: Frederick Wiseman’s construction of the observational microphone by Giovanna Chesler. By closely examining the construction of soundtracks in Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries High School and Domestic Violence, Chesler explores how sound editing in observational-style documentary provides a seemingly continuous foundation that enables storytelling and editing techniques more familiar to fiction filmmaking.

Media activists for livability: an NFB experiment in 1970s Vancouver by Jean Walton. In the early 1970s, the National Film board brought its Challenge for Change Program to a troubled suburb on Canada’s West Coast, putting cameras into the hands of disenfranchised residents. The land use battles that ensued complicated Vancouver’s image as the Shangri-La of the North.

New media and politics: populist revolt, state control, and elections by Lyell Davies. Review of Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns, eds., Tweets From Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as it Unfolded, in the Words of the People who Made it; Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; Richard L. Fox and Jennifer M. Ramos, eds., iPolitics: Citizens, Elections, and Governing in the New Media Era

Work-in-progress: Marie Menken and the mechanical representation of labor by Caroline Guo. Through her experimental short films, Marie Menken reveals how cinema’s capacities lie not only in the mechanical workings of the camera but also the potentials of human labor, leading us to bigger reflections on the inextricable ties between filmmaking, labor, and modern society.

Should the Dark Knight Have Risen? by Todd McGowan. The radical politics of Christopher Nolan's new film lies in Bane's voice and in its critique of the idea of harmony and balance, as represented by Miranda Tate.

Feeling and form in the films of Claire Denis by Ian Murphy. Shattering the laws of traditional narrative, Denis’ films Beau travail (1999) and Vendredi soir (2002) promote a purely rhythmic form that calls for a deeper mode of viewer engagement – with the screen, and with the self.

Welcome to Film Studies For Free

Founded in 2008, FSFFis lovingly tended (in a personal capacity) by Catherine Grant, Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She always wanted to be a Borgesian librarianwhen she grew up.

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